Lots of news stuff is happening in Dropbox-land today! The company is holding its first-ever developer conference, dubbed DBX, and has already made a slew of announcements highlighting new features.

Firstly, you may have already noticed the new icon that showed up in the Play Store. Not a huge difference, but a new look is a new look – all the good stuff is hidden behind the scenes, anyway.

New icon aside, the company has announced some pretty nice things that will be available to developers moving forward: the Datastore API, Chooser, and Saver. Sounds exciting, no? Here's a look at each thing in a nutshell.

Chooser

The Datastore API: Essentially, it's a cross-platform sync that works within applications to make data consistently available across all of your devices. For example, if datastores are incorporated into a task list (and the app is connected to your DB account), when you check an item off, you will see that change on your other devices, be it a computer, tablet, or other mobile.

Chooser: Chooser is a drop-in – a way for developers to connect Dropbox within their app with just a few lines of code – that will allow users to pull data directly from Dropbox into the app. This functionality has already been incorporated into Yahoo! Mail for Android and TextMe as of today – the updates are live in the Play Store.

Saver: Another drop-in, Saver brings the option to instantly save files to Dropbox. It's already available on many web apps, with iOS and Android updates "coming soon."

Saver

So far it's been a pretty big day for Dropbox developers and users alike. For more information on the aforementioned features, head over to the official Dropbox Blog.

Cameron is a self-made geek, Android enthusiast, horror movie fanatic, musician, and cyclist. When he's not pounding keys here at AP, you can find him spending time with his wife and kids, plucking away on the 6-string, spinning on the streets, or watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on repeat.

Comments

Choser and Saver. Shouldn't those already be taken care of by Android intent?

Christopher Lee

Yes, but it's not necessarily desirable for them to try and hijack the default Android file picking intent just yet.

http://www.androidpolice.com/author/cody-toombs/ Cody Toombs

I'm not sure if Simon was referring to Android's options for picking files from the filesystem, or an Intent meant to communicate with the Dropbox app. So I'll answer both.

Intent for Dropbox app:
It looks like these will be useful for keeping user activity in a dialog box instead of necessarily switching screens. I think it also might remove the necessity of having the actual dropbox app installed, which is actually important for the more typical user. Based on the descriptions in the developer blog, these also conform to the stricter permission system Dropbox is trying to enforce.

Filesystem picker:
There's a really big reason this can't work. The mobile version of Dropbox doesn't sync everything like the desktop version does. Because of that, the filesystem rarely matches your dropbox folders. Obviously, you would need something that connects to the server to get a full selection.

Either way, these two "drop-ins" appear to be more important for websites and iOS than they are for Android, but they won't hurt anything.

Christopher Lee

#2 is why I noted that it's unlikely that any filesystem intents would be used for picker and chooser, unless Dropbox began to support outside-of-folder syncing (for one) and their offline handling is really good (for two).

nehrou

Gosh this new icon on my dock app is ugly...I NEED that old icon back

http://us.playstation.com/ps4 Mark Cerny

Just edit the icon and replace it with the old one -_-

Nick Saulino

Yea, that iOS icon that showed up on my S4 today needs to go. I want my icon with transparency back.

http://us.playstation.com/ps4 Mark Cerny

Assuming you're using a Nova, you can edit the icon.

Kcls

I don't understand companies logic in stuff like this. "Look, we took all the time to design this new icon!" And it still doesn't follow Google's guidelines.

Freak4Dell

In this case, it looks like they just took the time to copy the iOS icon.

melhiore

This icon belongs to them, they have created it so they did not take anything from iOS... It is Drop Box icon!! It is not pretty by the way...

Freak4Dell

I didn't say they took it from iOS. I said they copied the iOS icon, which, when read properly using context clues, means they copied their iOS icon.

RBI411

Hoping they also say something about a Dropquest for this year. They have been tons of fun.